Coaches Panel with Bill Gallagher, Daniel Marcos & Herb Cogliano

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Hello again, everyone. So much changing. When things change with you though, things change around you. Especially true for leaders. That's a quote that Bird shared recently. We don't know the source of that, but it's a pretty good one. When things change inside you, things change around you. And the idea for Michael Jordan that learning is a gift even when pain is the teacher. I think about some of the most valuable lessons, right. One in particular that cost me several million dollars in personal pain and I use it all the time with my clients today it involves balance metrics and the right people on the job, things like that. We're talking today about unreasonable hospitality, managing versus doing, managing versus leadership, doubling your business without doubling the people, where innovation comes from, how pricing evolves, what's happening with the economy and taking care managing your time. All that and more coming up. Well, as you can maybe see or hear, I'm joined by a couple of great guests today. Fellow coaches, Herb Cogliano, Daniel Marcos. Daniel's also head of our elearning platform, the Growth Institute. They'll be talking about that. Herb's a recent guest of the show, also with one of his client success stories. So Boston and Austin in the house and Oakland bringing up representing for the west coast, everybody, I'm Bill Gallagher, scaling coach and host of our show. This show is all about everything you need to scale and grow your business over time. So we cover people, strategy, execution, cash, everything from the scaling up framework, plus a whole lot of leadership along the way. What I like to say is the fifth decision and there's all kinds of stuff, show notes and more to download@scalingcoach.com you go to scalingcoach.com our website and get whatever you want there. Over 450 shows now. So there's something on every topic that you might imagine and some really fabulous guests over the years. So I'm of course also you can go wherever you are now. So Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Twitter, Apple, podcasts like that like subscribe, get your notifications there so that you don't miss a show. We come out every week. So I'm joined now by Daniel Marcos, who's in Austin, Texas and Herb Cogliano in the Boston area. Welcome guys.

How are you? Thanks for the invitation.

Yeah, thank you, Bill. Great to be back.

We have no gals this week. We had a gal but she had a last minute family emergency to deal with. So you know, it's funny this time, right the season, family stuff comes up, right? Family. There's tensions and there's people traveling around the world and and right now there's people getting sick as well with multiple illnesses and filling hospitals and things like that. So it's a lot to think about. But I thought that a really great place to start our show was an article and a podcast that Vern shared recently where Simon Sinek interviewed Will Gadara. Will is a restaurateur famous for developing eleven Madison park, one of the at least at one point, the number one restaurant in the world, but consistently in the very top restaurants in the world. And he's the author of a book, Outstanding Hospitality. Simon Sinek interviews him Simon, one of our favorites, past speaker with Scaling up and we were using his content continually. But he shares a story in there that you guys both had a chance to read that I thought was really awesome and goes to something not only in our last, like in our families, about being hospitable over the holiday break as people gather in whatever your family traditions are and whatever holidays you celebrate or don't, but in the first one, they're shar he's serving a dirty water hot dog in New York to guests in a three star, three Michelin star restaurant, right? And that's a remarkable thing. But in it, Will recounts a story where some foodies have been traveling around and sampling the best restaurants in New York. And then he overheard them musing about how they'd done everything except a dirty water hot dog. And so seizing the inspiration and the inside of the moment, right? Not about the most gourmet experience, which they're already providing, but the exceptional listening and connection to someone. He runs out the door and buys a dirty water hot dog and then brings it back, persuades the chef to cut it up into four portions and serves it before the last savory course of the evening. Serves it up beautifully. Here's your dirty water hot dog. And people are blown away. They're touched by this thing, right, where somebody did something and listened and connected. And he says that's the difference between service and hospitality. Hospitality is that connecting to people, listening for and there's not a moment like you can't do it every single second of every single day. It's really about that deeper connection and willingness to step out of it. But I feel like I've had a couple recently that were not that epic and memorable, but we're pretty good in that regard. One of them happened I had a really horrible experience getting stuck in the Schaipol airport Amsterdam early this year.

I remember the story in the summer, but Europe was a Mess.

My wife, and she's related this story to him, and it was awful. And we're standing there and we're waiting. The information's bad. Now, at this time, it wasn't unique to us. Like, there was epic breakdowns all across Europe, and Amsterdam was among the worst of them. And so there we are, stuck, and we're having this horrible thing. And, like, I'm standing at this counter for hours, and they can't get their systems. These two airlines can't get their systems to talk together, which is horrible, and happens to all of us, where there's a technical failure and the people don't seem to have any way to override it. Right. There's no ability or authority to circumvent the whole thing. And, like, I. I'm literally saying there, I've got to go to the bathroom, but I'm afraid to go away to go to the bathroom for, like, four hours anyway.

I'm.

I'm ready to, like, beat someone or, like, I'm. I've totally lost it. Lori managed to stay cool. My wife Laurie, through all of that. So then at the end of this, this guy sees us. He's the, like, station manager for United Airlines, and he recognizes that we're, like, the exception case. And he's like, come here, come here. Let me take. He's like, how are you? What's been going on? So he hears our story, and he's like, come on, let me take care of you. Like, there's not a lot I can do right now, but I'm going to do something. So he personally, like, walks us down, and he buys this Burger King, which is the only thing that's available there. But he, like, stands with us and shepherds us through ordering the system, because at that point, I might have broken their terminal ordering system. I was so frustrated, I'm going to punch the thing. And buddy stands on the orders. He pays for it. And then he waits while we eat our Burger King at midnight. And he sits there with us, just talking to us, visiting with us while we. And then he puts us in a taxi. He. He makes some phone calls. He arranges a hotel. They've already since put all the other passengers into voucher hotels, but he arranges something, puts us in a taxi, sends us off to our hotel, says, come on back in the morning. We're going to get you on a flight. So we come back in the morning. He sees us again. He's like, oh, you guys are the ones. You were the outliers. You were the people. And he's like, today, now, I'm a pretty high tier United flyer, but not anywhere near the top. So he's like, today, you're a global services passenger. And he puts us as the very first two people on the airplane ahead of everyone else. He's like. Like secretly, you know, not to make a big show to. To upset the other people, but, like, here you go. Like, just like, little kind. Did that make a huge difference? No, but it felt like somebody acknowledged we were having a difficult time and was going out of their way. And that to me, that guy embodied that.

And.

And to be honest, I started flying United a lot more, even though I recognize some of their systems and things aren't the best.

Yeah.

Because quick story on United, because everyone destroys United. United has really bad stories in the media.

They have a lot of bad stories.

Yeah. But I have to accept. But I'm pretty high also. On United, we travel a lot as coaches. We're all time traveling to our clients, and pretty high, of course. And I've been traveling many years with them. And one day I flew to San Francisco. I had a meeting in Silicon Valley with a venture capital. So I fly, and I'm really nervous because I'm going to raise money from the company. And I land. I go rushing to rent the car. I'm going in the rental car, driving to Silicon Valley, and I get this phone call. So I get the phone and said, Mr. Marcos? And I was like, yeah. By any chance that you forgot your laptop on the plane? Like, oh, my God. I was going to pitch the investor with my laptop. I had my presentation, so I just get into my bag and I left my laptop on the plane. So, like, ma', am. Yes. I'm on my way back. I'm already on the car. It will take me, like, 20 minutes to go back. And he said, don't worry, so you don't have to go through security. We're going to send them to the ladies in the baggage claim. I said, fine. So I turned around, I'm driving back, and like 20 minutes after, I get another phone call. And I was like, yes, Mr. Marcos, are you on your way? And I was like, yeah, I'm just like two minutes away. Let me just park. No, no, no. For you not to park. Someone's gonna go out to the Curve to get your laptop so you don't have to bark. I was blown away. Yeah, they've done two or three like, those to me. And that's why with them, whenever I'm in. In That I make a mistake or something like that. They usually treat you very well if. If they recognize that you have a high status on their line, that they treat you well. I've left things on the plane three or four times. They've always done everything to bring them back, so that works great for me. Hey, Bill. Yeah?

Sir, I. I had an interesting story. I have a dear friend, he's been a state police for over 25 years. He's at Logan Airport and he gets a call. There's a group of rowdy college kids whose flight had got delayed for spring break. And he's called down because, you know, he has to keep them all under control. So normally they'd come over and say, hey, kids, you either got to relax or you're gonna be asked to leave. He knew spring break was really important. He knew they just finished finals and that they were just trying to let off some steam. He went out with his own money, bought a dozen pizzas, had them delivered with several cases of water, showed up to these group of about 25 college kids, sat down with them, gave them pizza, gave them water, and they were the most well behaved group you'd ever meet. And that, you know, is a great example of unreasonable hospitality, because in his job, he's got to keep the peace and keep everybody happy. And yet he went outside the conventional thinking to connect with these kids and get them safe to their trip, and everybody around them was safe in terms of serving the public. So there's stories like this all around us if we really open our eyes and know how to look for them.

Great story, Herb. And he could come and say, hey, I'm the law. This is what you have to do, and that's it. Or just distract them with pizza and water, and they behave well, by the way, there's one story on the restaurant similar to that of the podium. Like, whenever you come, there's this lady in front of this throwing the back of this thing. I don't know how you call it in English. Sorry for my. My lack of. Of English, but, you know the. The desk where the lady receives you? Yeah. They don't have it. And it's just by design because it feels like you're behind the thing. So you don't have it. And it's a better way to. Whenever someone comes in, there's someone storage, like one of these ladies standing in the door, but without anything, without a computer, just receiving people, has a list just by hand in paper, receives whatever or an iPad, and takes them to the desk and they said that's way simpler and it doesn't feel like you have this wall in the middle. So I thought that was very cool.

Connecting to people. Well, I think, you know, a lot of people talk about, oh, Ritz Carlton, and it's ladies and gentlemen serving ladies and gentlemen. And I think there are many other stories for other companies, but they built a brand around this and of course it's more expensive on the whole to stay there and, and they have that expectation, but they also have the structures. Not only are they hiring for it and building their culture, they have the structures to empower it. So they give authority to staff to hear and handle problems with some budget limit. So there's some boundary around it to solve a problem. So if they overhear you talking about sleeping poorly or you tell them, oh, I had a terrible night, I didn't sleep well at all, they can do things like, you know, say, hey, you know what? The meal's on us. And like, here you go, here's something else, or whatever. Like, they can do things to create those surprise and delight moments. And I think too often we treat our teams and staff like morons and we're worried about the risk and we don't give them any authority. We don't give them any power to do anything. So you call and you get transferred to a call center in any country other than the one you're in. And then the lowest paid person reads a script and walks you through steps that you already did yourself. And then they can't offer any exception. And there's no, like, escalation. And they, they don't do anything to make it nice. And it's, it's really, it's remarkable. I had a thing recently where I had some difficult experience with another business very, very recently. And, and so I sent off a note after, like, being really frustrated in numerous interactions, trying to set up one thing with the company. And I'm like, please cancel my membership. Please refund the money spent. I'm unable to use your company, blah, blah, blah. And the next thing I get back is from the owner who's like, thanks for this. Let me do some investigating. If you're willing to talk to me later, I'd like to talk. So then he goes and he investigates the whole thing to try to figure out what. And then he calls me back and he. And again, he just listens to me, right? And I think, like, listening, connecting is the ver. Like, how did it go? What happened? So now he's talked to his staff, now he's hearing my story, and mostly I'm sharing the pain along with the difficulties. And he's like, well, I really get it. I have something to propose, if you're willing to consider. I'm like, okay, I'm, you know, I'll. I'll listen. But at this point, I'm like, you know, I'm sharing with you because I am a coach and a CEO background, and I think I would want to know if somebody is willing to listen. I'm like, telling you, but your company is effed anyway. He says, listen, I'd like to take care of you personally and take you through this whole thing and see if we can change it. I'm going to shepherd you through these initial things myself personally, and. And if it's great, then great, and let's see if we can take care of you. And I think you'll be fine after that. And we're dealing with all the other things that you pointed to, which are real important things for us to deal with in the company, but we'll get you through this thing. And I was like, okay. And. And sure enough, he did. And it was unbelievable. And I'm like, I love this guy. I love this company. Now, you know, so clearly they had problems and they're addressing him. But we all have problems. We all have systems breakdown. We have people who lack bad training and like, that kind of thing. Are you willing to really be connected, to go beyond. Right. Really critical? That whole thing about, do you actually care? Which is a good segue to the Steve Jobs article. So it's an ink article about Jobs talking about the difference between managers and people who know how to manage and constrain things and people who want to get things done. Like, what is the mission of the business? What is the point? What are you trying to do? What do you like? And in the article, Jobs says.

Hire.

People who want to get things done and then teach them some leadership skills. Right, Herb Daniel.

So let me. Okay, I'll tell the story. Both of you guys know and work a lot with Set. Seviera runs our customer Success department and now product. And one day he was running customer Success, and when the pandemic started, he came to me and said, hey, we're really tired of working with all the LMS that we rent. Want to build our own. And I was like, say, I got it, but we rent an LMS that they did 40.

You're talking about the systems, the Learning Management.

Learning Management system. That's the system we use at the Growth Institute to Deliver the courses. And, and Seth said, we want to build our, our own. And I would like say, I'm sorry, but these guys have built $50 million in their one that we're renting. We're paying a hundred thousand dollars a year to rent it. And I said, I don't think you could do anything, not even close to it. And he looks at me and said, I think we could do it for like 200,000 and we could have it right in a year. And I was like, no, it's impossible. So they prepare a plan and they came to me and said, you'll have your own LMS for around 200,000 in a year or so. And I said, fine. And that's what we use today. And the experience is way better. But talking about someone that cares, he said, I'm customer success. I could not deliver the success that I want, so I'm going to have to get into product and really understand how to build the best so I could deliver the experience I want to deliver. Blown away.

Blown away.

And that's someone that cares. And by the way, talking about not having the skills to be on the C suite, now he's in the C suite. As you guys know, at the Growth Institute, we have a very young team. A lot of them are millennials. All my leadership team, or most of my leadership are team are millennials. And we have always said we have to be the best users of our own tools and technologies and learning. And what we realize is we need to prepare our team to be C Suite ready. So we're going to launch next year a program of how to be C Suite ready, the C Suite, the CEO, SEO, whatever. Hire great team members that they become great running the company, but they don't have the skills to be on the C suite. So we're working for three months and really building that curriculum and we will launch it next year. We have a lot of the class already. We're just going to put it in a format that makes sense and will give you all the options to help you prepare your teams to be C Suite ready. The other one that we're building is first time leaders and we're going to talk about leadership a little bit lower. Same thing. You get a frontline employee that are doing amazing things and you make them a manager. And that's what Jack Davey says. The biggest mistake, making your best sales agent a sales manager. You lose your best sales agent and you gain a lousy sales manager normally. So we're building a program for first time leader and we're going to talk about leadership and management in the near future. And that's it. That's exactly why. Because we have most of our team members that start being frontline employees that we're elevating to be leaders and then C suite, and they do a great job. They really care about fixing things. They just don't have the leadership and tools to really be able to be on the C suite.

Yeah, yeah, Daniel. When we went through that in our company, I think what was most telling is that these managers were used to getting things done their way. They were very successful. Then you give them a group of three to five people that didn't do things their way. And we needed to teach these managers how to, I think, as Vern would say, play chess versus checkers. Know that each person moves differently, has a unique strength, and yet at the end of the day, if you can put all these moves together, you can have a winning strategy. And that, that was the missing link for these young managers, teaching them how to play chess. But boy, once they got it, they were even more amazing than they were in the beginning.

Brilliant. Exactly.

Well, I, you know, it's interesting because our first story was a Simon Sinek interview with a restaurateur. And when I think about the, like jobs is talking about people want to get things done, purpose centered people. If you have people who are aligned with your purpose, who are out to fulfill your brand promises, have those people who care first about that, rather than like, I manage a department or a team and that kind of thing. That is kind of the premise of servant leadership. Serving the purpose of the company, serving the customer, serving, serving the team, serving anything except themselves or their kingdom.

Right.

Like a department is like a kingdom or a fiefdom. If you're in service of, of almost anything else that you're moving into servant leadership. Right. I'm in service of something else. I care about that. That's the person.

And Herb, you got it right when you said instead of playing checkers, you're playing chess. That's understanding that now you work for them. Now you work to make them grow and be better leaders and how to position them for them to excel and how to cover the weaknesses or coach them on how to not. Not getting better, but manage them and that's serving them. I believe the best CEOs are the ones that are able to have that change of mindset and said, my team doesn't work for me, I work for them and my job is to help them be more successful. And the More successful they are, the more successful they're going to make my company.

I was just going to mention Vern recently shared that the CEO of the Girl Scouts of America passed away at 107. And in her interview they asked her, how did you do the wonderful things you did? And she simply said, number one, listen. Number two, life is about service. And everything she did embodied was around service to others, which we know in leadership. But the third thing I thought was really telling was not a whole list of leadership frameworks, concepts. She said, pick a few values that you truly embody as a leader and spend the rest of your career living them consistently and treating people within those values that you so closely hold is one of the best ways to be an incredible leader. Obviously picking the right values to embody for your company.

You know, there's a principle that I think is really relevant for our scale ups that I think about all the time. And it is that what I like to call the Goldilocks principle. And it's true of like people, managers, vendors, partners, like all that, even customers maybe. And it's about the right size, right? Goldilocks, as you know the story. And the three bears, right? There were three bears, Mama bear, papa bear, baby bear. And they would try on the bed and the chair and the things like that. And only ever was one the right size for the whole thing they had. And Goldilocks was a whole other size. And I think many of our companies, we choose somebody who's the wrong size. We choose a vendor who's too big or too small. Too small and they can't do what we need to do and too big and they don't care about us. So when we find the vendor who is the right fit for us, they can take us a little bit further down the road, but they actually care about us. The same thing true with the people. If you hire one of our teams. SAS company a few years ago hired somebody with a fantastic resume of somebody who had built and grown several organizations to where they wanted to be. But the problem was the person was had now done that a few times and wasn't interested in doing it anymore. Right? They had gotten old enough and experienced enough. They didn't want to go back to and repeat what their younger self did. And we interviewed three critical people some years ago and we had the person who seemed like they were right for our organization, the most obvious like background. We found the person who we most wanted to hire, the very corporate person who had the fantastic resume. And we thought that person is going to take us. And then there was this surprising person who's much younger, much less experienced, but seemed to be the right fit, who would take us further. And we thought, wow, this woman is brilliant and really capable and insightful, and she seems to bring just the right balance of creativity and passion for getting. And what she wanted to do was build a brand, which is what we needed to do at the time. And we're like, I think we've got her for only a couple of years and then she's going to move on. And in fact, fact, she was brilliant and was right sized and we did have her for about two years. And then she's like, she went on and she's now CEO of a very successful toy company doing that she launched and founded doing stem toys for girls called Goldilocks. Goldilocks. And it's a, you know, ties in, of course, to this idea of Goldilocks. But I think, you know, there are times when we hired an accounting firm or a bank or that kind of thing who we thought was the right thing, but they didn't care about us because they were too big.

Right.

Like finding that person who really wants to get the job done, who's right for that particular thing in that time. And some people level up, but a lot of people don't. Right. There are people who just kind of hit their place and they just want to do what they want to do and stay at that level or who want to look at, you know, in the mirror and not do it again.

So well. Yeah. So, Bill, what have you been seeing and heard what you guys have been seeing on leadership changes now? Now we kind of settle in half remote, half hybrid, or whatever you want to call it. And what kind of leadership things you're seeing changing, Be able to manage remote teams like that or hybrid teams the way we are today.

You know, I. Herb and I were talking about this in a show with his client about being. Balancing the virtual, mostly virtual team who's added what they call leg days.

What is a leg day? I would love to hear the story.

Tell that story and then we'll talk about. And the leadership.

So, you know, in zoom, how everything is from the waist up.

Of course.

Well, they wanted to have get togethers where they called it leg week, where you get to see the whole person, including their legs and their feet and leg was for leadership group. So it was a leadership group meeting. So they called it leg week, which I thought was really, really fun.

That's really fun. And they meet every week or every couple of weeks. How often they meet?

Once a year, right?

Yes.

Yeah, once a year is a week to come together.

So we, we did that with our team. We took, we took 30 team members to Vallejo Bravo two weeks ago, and it was amazing. We really had a great time. We, we did two days of work, full work, of course, having good dinners with wine and tequila and have fun. But during the day it was all work, no alcohol, no nothing. And then three days of having more fun and connection. And we love it. We. I, I've seen like, there's like five team members I've never met. The last couple of years. We've been remote. I've never met them, so it was great to see them. And the one thing that people said, they said, hey, Daniel, can we figure out how to do this every six months, one every year? It's too far. And I said, well, if we're growing and making money and getting to our goals, yeah. So we put a numbers, and if I told the team, if you get into your numbers, we could meet every six months. You want to get to a numbers? We can't just get the team to commit there, Daniel.

I think the other thing I'd add to it, with more of a global type remote workforce, I've seen more of the CEOs leaning towards regional meetings where they get different groups from different parts of the world together. So if we can't get everybody, we're going to get groups of us together so that we can keep that connection. Also have several wonderful CEOs that are doing weekly CEO messages by video to their entire company, keeping them aligned on company highlights, core value recognitions, quarterly priorities, quarterly theme updates, birthdays, staff anniversaries. I tell them each to take their iPhone. I don't want it any more than one and a half to three minutes in length. They can do it anywhere in the world. There's no excuse. And now they're doing a weekly communication to these people because I think in a virtual world you need to be that much more proactive with your communication.

So you're talking about a simple CEO message recorded and sent out.

Yes.

You know, I'm seeing three or four things. One of them is, and I don't have a lot of this, companies who've insisted on go back to work, like everybody back in person, all that kind of thing. And I think that kind of rigid inflexibility misses the opportunity of what we've just gone through. Then I see people who are like all virtual and there's some zoom, fatigue There's a lack of real connection and some things like that where people like, they're all on zoom all the time. And I also see some, some trouble with that. And then there's two other that I see the people who are kind of accidentally hybrid like oh, some people happen to be near or need an office or that kind of thing in there in person. The other person are all virtual and they've just sort of let it evolve without a lot of innovation, creativity, design thinking. And then there are these people that are starting to do like Herb, your company's doing and Daniel, yours, where they're blending so they're, they're often remote or some people are in person and then they're creating intentional days to come together that are thoughtfully designed, balanced with the budget in mind and connecting with people. And I think that that's the real opportunity. There are some people that can do most of their work remotely or, and work in small teams. And then there are people that really need to be in person because we provide a face to face service or you know, whatever it is like that. And, and then there are people that could, you know, I could do scheduling and phone support and things like that, probably remotely. But having a few times a year to connect and meet some people face to face can force those human bonds and connections. Yeah.

Bill, you know what was interesting and I think you heard this from Katie yesterday. They were virtual for 12 years. Like they began as a virtual company and people could come and go meetings whenever they wanted. And when they started scaling up and they implemented the daily huddle, people were not used to having to be at a call at 8:08 in the morning. And what I reminded her was it's wonderful that we can be virtual, but that doesn't mean the company doesn't have structure and accountability. So you can have the flexibility of being remote, but not Lucy. Oh, you know what, let me try something here while you guys continue. Let me see if I can get my bandwidth up for a moment.

Yeah, so I'll tell the story quick here. And Herb knows this. We, we, we run with Scaling Up Growth Institute. So we have dailies and weekly and we have a lot of meetings. Yeah. So every year we have two weeks that we don't get any meetings. So our last daily meeting of the year was Friday, December 16th and the next one is going to be on January 3rd. So there's two weeks that there's no internal meetings, there's no rhythm, there's no KPIs. Like we, everyone has to get their goals. They still have to achieve their KPIs, but we just break the structure. So they could really be flexible on their timing and be able to spend more time with their families and the rest. But here's the other thing that we did important. We put our yearly priorities and quarterly priorities a couple of weeks ago. So now everyone knows what they're going to have to accomplish next year. So in those two weeks, they have to do a project that will best prepare them to accomplish their goals next year. So something that you need some thinking time and not distract the time to do an improvement in your area. So you could really get better to get to your goals next year. So a lot of people are saying, hey, I need to redo this part of the app, or hey, I'm going to do a strategy of how to double the amount of clients that I get in this funnel. Or hey, I'm going to. As an example, I'm launching a new YouTube channel next year. We're getting all the structure of the YouTube channel, how much we want to do. We bought a couple of course and a couple of books. We're going to go through the books on the courses during those two weeks and really think our outreach structure through YouTube and then we're going to start with a plan next year. These are the things that you don't have time during the week that you're running and you're trying to squeeze half hour and one hour in the middle. Now we don't have that. So everyone came. We have a Google Doc that everyone said what are projects they're going to do and what they're going to improve and then what they have to say, what they're going to do on their personal life in these two weeks to be able to take advantage of the two weeks. And we've done that for three or four years. Works really, really, really well. And they are really thankful that we don't have any meeting or any structure those two weeks. So you could really have more loose time and enjoy their families, you know, you.

Yeah, go ahead, Herb.

I was just quickly, I was just gonna say very much like Bill Gates, which is with his Think Week.

Correct. It's kind of our Think Week for two weeks.

That's a great program.

On the subject of getting together, Vern led a thing. I co led with him the last couple days on this week on scaling up Summit, Vern came on. Daniel, you were also there talking about Growth Institute and those tools. But we took, I don't know, we had a couple Hundred people who went through all the scaling up basics intro over three days with the CEO session, but one, once or twice a year, Vern and I are leading. Vern does a number of these CEO boot camps around the place and we've been doing a couple of year in Lake Tahoe at a great resort there. And this is for CEO and CEO only. CEO COO or CEO president. We get together and we spend a week, almost a week at this resort with a small team and, and Veron and I'll be there April 18 to 21. Together we'll have, I don't know, you know, eight to 10 companies probably and however many can fill our small room in this resort. And we go through all the basics of scaling up alongside other CEO CEOs so you get a chance to connect and learn and listen. And it's a really great experience in a beautiful place. And if it's like last year, we'll still have skiing in April and so you can get a few days or do some snowshoeing or whatever you like to do up there. I got a couple of half days of skiing in the last time we were up there. But it's just a really great small group alongside other CEO CEOs, COOs grappling with all the work of scaling up and then thinking about your leadership. Who am I? What would I need to do to do this? What's the opportunity of this time for us? What would it look like, that kind of thing, like being a leader and leading your company through this time? There's a lot to think about in a very changing environment. This is a period of continuing change, right? The most shocking change happened at the beginning of the pandemic. But we're still dealing with the ripple and the aftermath of that. And things are. I mean, look in China places. There's reports, I don't know if it's verified, but in some places half the population has Covid right now. Like in the where I'm in the US that seems really remote. Except we're also reading today that hospitals are full. Like we're still dealing with change and impact and flux of things, right? So this is an opportunity to come together and do. Unlike the last one that we did all on Zoom, this one is very much in person. We have some great dinners, we have great walks with the trees and the mountains behind us at a great resort and a great all in one kind of package. So you can find that@CEO boot camp.com CEO of Wanda if you've got that, you can put that on the screen. CEO-Boot Camp.com is the link and we'll put that in the show notes as well. It's April 18 to 21. Squaw Creek is the resort resort at Squaw Creek owned by one of our CEO friends. We do a lot of our team meetings at this resort are our annual and mid year off sites often go to this particular resort. So it's a fantastic place. We know really well on the west coast and there's a YPO one only coming up soon. I forget where that one was. Maybe it's Denver. But anyway there's a few of them a year but not not many. I think the other thing to think about kind of moving on is this idea of like let's 10x, let's double the company but let's not 10x the cost and the expense and the like. Let's find ways to do more with less. That is kind of the heart of innovation. One of our fellow coaches, one of my dear friends, Jennifer Berkowitz Vern writes a story up recently about whether the mother and the daughter switched roles in the company and they then won an award and grew the company and did quite a bit more with only 50% increase in the people. And I don't know if anything in that those that story stood out for either of you but I thought it was a great story about leveling up by changing roles and who cares there?

Well we like I look at the ways we talk to our clients about doubling their business. You know, first and foremost where does automation play a role? Is there a way to leverage that efficiency? A lot of talk about AI and the different ways of leveraging intelligence and process. We then look at outsourcing opportunities. I had one client that had a service model that was valued but he couldn't fund it economically. So he looked at an outsourcing relationship. He was able to get the numbers right and now that business has growing in doubling year over year, top line and bottom line. And then we're looking at staff training inefficiency which we know we always have to be dealing with. And then we look at diversification. You're using one line of service, but I have two extra I can add on to the same client therefore tripling my revenue and then ultimately partnerships, joint ventures. And the real issue is going through with your team in picking which of those are best for you. And that's part of the sweat the SWOT process. Where's my next pivot product extension? And so I'm Sure. Bill and Daniel, you've been seeing that with your clients across the board as well.

There's so much opportunity these days to tighten up. In the case with Jennifer and team, they build an advisor team, they swap the roles between the mother and the daughter in running the business and, and they put work on their processes. They built the culture around the whole thing. They changed some of the business model on the cash side to do it. Like, there's a lot of, a lot of moves there that we see. And some of these ideas, right, are talked about by others. Like one of the guys that I coach in the past is a guy by the name of Salim Ismail, who essentially did the work to launch the Singularity University. And then he wrote a book about exponential organizations. And Daniel, you've got a program with Salim on that. But the idea of doing that, another one of our old emp, birthing a giants master's program graduates a guy by the name of Tim Danley. And somebody approached Tim with an idea for a company that did something really cool in terms of wastewater and processing for cities and rural areas. And they had this technology and Tim said, you know what, I'm going to rethink this whole business because I've been down the scaling up road a couple times. And Tim built a company that went over 200 million with only four employees using some of those same ideas. He's a past guest, I want to say, is episode number 37 on our show, Tim Danley. 200 million with only three or four employees. And basically, basically what they did is they, they created a lot of partnerships around the world. So they built a technology demonstration center and he's a Dallas based entrepreneur, but they built this in Las Vegas. People flew in from all over the world to see the tech demo if they liked it, and they thought it was good for their, whatever region they managed in the world, they signed a letter of intent or whatever it is, and they paid some millions of dollars for that basic thing. And then a technology partner built and implemented that technology for them in another city. So they had partners all over the world and they had contractors and contributors, but it wasn't all of them.

And I, I was, I was, when you guys were telling me that story, I was. Remember this slide that Vern used in the summit in Denver we had a couple of months ago that said when, when the, when, when you're in Formula One with. When the, the pavement is dry is very, very difficult to overcome. One car when the pavement is wet, it's very easy to overcome. Sometimes three or four cars at the same time. So I think this is a perfect analogy for where we're coming in and talking about innovation. The companies that don't get paralyzed mentally and they have all these issues when the company, the economy goes down, they usually do way better when the economy goes down because all their competitors are in drama and stress and they're really flying through the process. We all know stories in Covid of companies that double or triple and change their business completely because they just push themselves to figure out a different way to do things. And there's some companies that really, really struggle in Covid because they couldn't find a way to innovate and do things differently. So I challenge to people that are going to hear this in the next year. Everyone's saying 2023 is going to be a complicated year. We don't know if it's going to have a recession or not. But the one thing that we know, we're going to have a lot of chaos and we'll have a lot of chaos coming into the year and coming out of the year. And if you use that chaos that your competitors are in chaos and are in distress and you really think creatively and do things differently, you could have a much better year and experience with your clients. So those are the kind of things that are. When you were telling how you help your, your clients, that was coming to mind, how can I use this next year, a couple of years to really be able to do 2 times, 3 times, 10 times or it's not just about growth, it's just about doing things different to be more efficient. That's why I like there's a video out there from Dan Sullivan. It's called why growing 10x. It's easier than 2x. And it's all that mindset. It's beautiful. It's like a three minute video. I think it's one of the best videos I've seen in YouTube and it tells the story of how whenever you're trying to grow 2x, you see everything that helps you grow 5 and 10% or whatever. And you're so busy doing all these small things that you don't see the big ones. Whenever you said how can I grow 10x? You start just seeing everything that grows 10x and then everything that grows 10 or 20%, you just remove it and don't get distracted by the small things. So I think that's when this innovation, swapping roles and everything will help you. Instead of just saying how can I grow 10% is how can I grow 2 or 10 times the company?

This is my, my first and second question with any prospective client. Somebody says, you know, I think I need a scaling up coach. I'm like, why? What is the goal? And if somebody says 10x100x a billion, number one in the world, I'm all in. I'm interested already. As long as they're not selling poison or something like that. Right? So poison, guns, whatever you want a 10x100x hit a billion, be number one in your category. I love that. But sometimes they're like, I think I want to coach, but I'm not sure that's my game. The second one is, are you willing to play that game? And if you're willing to play that game, if you're willing to go from wanting to double your company to playing a 10x game, then I'm your coach or 10x or better. Because that's as you say, Daniel, that's where the different thinking comes. The doubling your company is all incremental. It's hard work. I tried it for a long time. It sucked. But creating a 10x and better BHAG, that's where the breakthroughs occur. That's where we reimagine things. Now you might see stuff and you might say, oh, I do not want to play a 10x game. That's totally fine. You just, you know, you might not be coaching with me or that's totally fine. It's just not our world. Like we're interested in it. Now, doubling the company happens pretty quickly when you're playing the 10x game, when you're thinking about how do I do that? And it's not always easy. Look, I've been thinking about how to 10x my coaching work for a little while now. And I have some ideas and some candidates and I'm more at work on something and it hadn't happened yet, but doubling the company has happen a couple times, you know.

Yeah. Phil, One of the most helpful parts of our scaling up frameworks, when you're talking to people about doubling and then ultimately 10 Xing with a BHAG is the 3 to 5 year key thrusts. Because you start to say in my current state, I don't know how the heck I'm going to double you, let alone 10x. But when you look at those few important things, like I remember a time for us where we were looking at franchising, never did it before, but we wanted to go nationwide and everybody on the leadership team loved it, sounded good, but nobody had a clue about franchising. And I remember Vern saying, it's not what you put on the key thrust that's going to make it successful, it's who on the bus that's going to drive it to success, whether it's an advisor, external hire, internal person developed. And I never forgot that key point that if I want to double or 10x, it's the what with the right who that's going to make that next evolution in my company possible. And without that, it wasn't going to happen. I was just going to spin my wheels and we went from two states to 20 states in three years because I needed market expansion to get the 100% year over year growth. If I wasn't thinking that way using the frameworks, it would have never happened for our company. So it's a, it's a great tool to enable the growth you want.

You know, it's a. So I, I think there are many times where the coach applying the framework helps you figure something out, but also just bringing an outside perspective. A lot of people contact us and want to find, hey, I want a coach who knows construction or contracting or accounting or professional services or no, don't do that. Like, it certainly helps if they know some of your terminology, but it actually sometimes is more useful not to. We had a team we were working with recently that was grappling with a problem and I had them explain it to me. I'm like, hey, I'm kind of dumb, I don't know your world. Like, tell me again what's happening. And as I listened and worked hard to understand, I'm like, why do you do that that way? And they started explaining, well, that's kind of the safety of our industry and the regulatory things. And I'm like, yeah, I don't think so. Like, I think actually you've conflated or confused those things. There are things that you need to do and I don't even understand those. But in this case, I think we're really talking about service. I think we're talking about some basic customer service issues and anticipating things. And here's what happens when I get my hair cut. And here's like, when I get my hair cut after we finish, she's like, oh, do you like the way the front and the back looks and fix anything? And. And then she's like, okay, so six weeks from now, do you want to schedule again? And she anticipates. So that's a little bit like the service and hospitality mindset. It has nothing to do with the safety of your regulatory, highly regulated industry. Like how do we anticipate the needs, serve them right. If I'm in the restaurant business, I don't walk. If I want to be efficient, if I want to be successful, I don't drop a hamburger in front of you and then ask if you need ketchup, if you need mustard, if you want another drink, like all that, you know, I want to anticipate that stuff. So when I bring you down the thing, I don't have to make three, four trips, I bring it all down at once. I've already brought ketchup and mustard. If you say, no, I don't need those, I leave them on my tray and I bring them back. But think about and anticipate the needs, take care of people. And the same thing true with our business. So the coach, being outside your industry, outside your company can often see things. Yes, you could hire a scaling up expert and train someone internally, but they won't bring that super valuable thing of working with dozens of companies over time or more and being outside your business. If we can help you find a Coach, we have 230 roughly coaches around the world. I'm one, Herb's one, Daniel's one. And we all have different styles, we work different areas. Some of us specialize in different kinds of things. But infocalingcoach.com is an email address that you can reach out to. And you know, I can say, hey, here's somebody in Texas or you want somebody who does a lot of CEO phone call, one on one coaching. You might want to talk to Daniel about that. You want somebody in herbs area, you know, so we're happy to recommend. I'm full right now and I tend to be full most of the time and really don't have a ton of room. But we're happy to connect you to one of the 230 others in your area. So infoalingcoach.com hey, it's on the crawl there on the bottom of the screen. We'll put it in the show notes as well. Let's talk about innovation. What's happening with your teams in terms of innovating? How are they grappling with stuff? Vern cited an article that I had already read, popular sciences 100 in most innovations, highest innovations of the year. And there are some really cool things in there like the James Webb telescope that is just mind blowing in terms of how far away it is and the kind of images it's bringing in if you're not seeing. But of course we're seeing lots of little innovations in many ways at home. And some of our companies do even process innovation, like the company that changed the way they did something in a very traditional industry to be more like what the woman who cuts my hair does. It turned out to be really valuable and important. Right. What are you guys seeing? What's your process? What is happening with your clients and the companies you're working with?

So what what I find for me, innovation is having the time to work on the business and be out there and constantly giving your mind, in your mindset an opportunity to connect to different things. I would go to different industry conferences, not my own, even vendors conferences, so that I could see the way they were using technology, they were servicing people. But yet if I didn't have a great leadership team working in the business, running it, I could never give myself that gift. And scaling up allowed us to do that. I think also you have to. We get kind of focused on. I'm only going to read business books, but I think the more you kind of read different subjects, different topics, business, non business, you draw from these things. Bill, what's the name of the book with the ants? Is it Willary?

Well, they're teaming.

Yeah. Teaming was a great example of learning from nature, how teams can work and collaborate and innovate. So for me it's get a dose of different areas, different industries and allow your mind to, to think and explore and bring a lot of these things together. Final thing I'll mention, I don't know if you guys are familiar with.

He's a past guest of the show, I think maybe even done a, an episode as well with. Or a class with Daniel.

I mean, we have a class with her learning suite. Yeah.

So I'm sorry, I'm blanking on her name teaming Tommy was on. Yeah, yeah. Thompson.

Thompson Worley.

Yeah. So anyway, search Tamsa and Tam Sin and our thing for teaming about getting people to work together well and solve problems together. Right?

Yeah. And learning from nature because I think there's so many different ways we have. If you're familiar with QuickBooks Intuit, they do 500 home visits a year. They send developers to your home to watch you use their software and they want to know, oh my God, he blinked over here. Or he was frustrated at the reporting or he didn't know how to use this feature. And they're always making notes, always innovating on the insights. When's the last time you've done a home visit or maybe a zoom virtual visit with somebody using your Product and.

We'Re, you know, it's funny, in the 90s I had a couple software companies and one of my companies built the, the first online banking interface for Wells Fargo Bank. So we built the first online banking interface and, and then we did some work for bank of America and for Fidelity and for some others. But Wells Fargo and I remember there's a lot of focus on getting the brand and customer experience right. But then of course we had the luxury of doing user test and so we put people and we watched them from the other side of the glass and the interviews, asked them, you know, okay, you have this, what do you do? And they wanted to see them work with the interface to see if we designed it well. And they said, okay, you want to get in touch with the company, what do you do? And we had a button like it was completely different colored. It was everything, it was like feedback I think is what it was called. I might be wrong, but it was like a red button in the corner of feedback and people couldn't figure it out. And something about that word didn't mean like get in touch with us. And so we ended up changing it. I wanted to say to like get in touch or something like that, right? Contact or get in touch. But the initial thing that had been like they gave us the copy and the design directives and that kind of thing and we just dropped down feedback. But it made sense to everyone in the process. It seemed like we knew what that, where that led to, but it didn't make sense to the users in the end. And I think that's really great about watching people actually use your business, like stand outside your business. I remember standing outside one of our client, past clients outside their business and watching people approach the retail location and interact. I'm like, what's a really long line there? What could you do with that line? How could you reduce that line? But also how could you make use of the line time? Maybe you could do your upselling while they're in line and get them excited about things. Maybe you could knock out some things that are going to happen later in the line while they're in line. And they ended up trying a whole bunch of those things and they, what they ended up doing is giving people an iPad as they walk through the line and then they arranged the signage taking advantage of the fact that people are in line and anticipating what they. So they were doing a lot of subtle things in the background while people were in line as well as trying to just short in the line.

And I Would like to come back to Herb. Herb, what you said is really important. If they have a lot of drama in their operation, they don't have the time to really work on the business. They're working in the business and they don't have the systems and process for that. Bill, you talk about EXO and exposure organization with Salim. We've implemented the model, the Sprint, many times and we've implement clients that already run with scaling up up and have a great operation. And we've done it with clients that don't run with scaling up and they have a lot of drama whenever you bring aggressive innovation. And that's what EXO is all about. Completely different change of mindset using the attributes of exo. If they don't run with scaling up or they have a haphazard operation, then the innovation end up killing the company or kind of choking the company. So you have to focus first on running very efficiently. As an example, in scaling up, we always tell companies they have to have six months of cash of in the bank. And people said, no, it's impossible. I cannot have six months of cash in the bank. And I was like, if you think that's impossible, then next time there's a downturn in the economy, I will say goodbye to you. It's going to be very, very hard for you to stay alive because you're going to be very reactive. If you have six months of cash in the bank, you think things way more strategically. You're really able to work on your business and really work in whatever is important and not what it's urgent. So, so what I'm seeing today is.

And it might take time to build that up, right? Like you're remembering the importance of that. Like, you don't go from zero to six months in the bank if you, if you're, if you're running right on the line with your cash, start building it up, add 1% for the next quarter, then jump it up a couple percent, right? Start to build those reserves until you've got that. Sometimes it takes a little time to, to build up to that.

As an example of Growth Institute, we have a automatic withdrawal of our account of X amount of money every Friday. It's just, I don't see it gets pulled every Friday. My controller did it and he said, we want to save all of this. Do you mind that I do it? Don't even tell me, just do it. So, because I see the money in the counter and that's what I run with. And he said, like, I'm going to take 2,500 or whatever a month, a week, take it off. And we're putting all this money in the bank. So when, if and when the economy gets tough again, we're going to be in great position.

Well, another one of your courses at the Growth Institute, and we could put up the growthinstitute.com on the crawl. So you've got many, many courses and master programs and that kind of thing for your executive development, plus a whole learning management system in LMS that you can add your own things. So growthinstitute.com is that link. And among the things, there also is Mike Michalowicz who talks about profit first and reserving, setting aside some money and managing it and getting it out of yourself, because it depends on the kind of company that you have. But many of us are entrepreneurs who have grown our companies and manage things not always as strategically as we might like with our cash. But Mike Michalowitz in his profit first course teaches that kind of person how to begin to set your buckets aside and move the money and get it out of sight, out of mind. And I know that I operate today with many months of cash in reserve and available credit. So we have more credit and more cash available. And I know if there's a blip or a shock to the economy like there was back in 2020, I'm more than prepared to handle it right within the business, not having to fund it personally or sacrifice anything. Right. I've got my living expenses covered for many months, plus my team. And we saw that. And the thing I had another team member offer to work for free as needed during the pandemic. And I said, no, no, no, we're reserved for this. And we did free coaching work for clients when the shock of the pandemic hit and we took on more clients than ever before because people were panicked and didn't have the money. But they really needed coaching and, you know, being in a place to do that like, so what are all the lessons that you need to learn? How does, how do you and your team need to level up all that and more. @growth institute.com They've also got the Master Business Dynamics course, which is kind of like an MBD for entrepreneurs that's online or an MBA like mbd.

And if you allow me here, something that's changing as an example, we get clients that they purchase courses with us continuously. And I told a lot of them, hey, why don't we get into our retainer? I could give you a much lower price And I get recurring revenue, so I'll be better for both. And my clients start. They didn't tell us that up front, but they were telling all these excuses and things. And then we realized that internally we were built to give individual courses and not give you continuous value. And Vern always have pushed me and the team. How can we provide 100% solution of learning and development teams and companies, they want learning and development, they just, they don't know how. They have no idea how to do it and they don't have the time to do it right. So he said, hey, why don't we do like a chief learning and development person with all the courses and will build your own corporate university inside Gradisu? It makes all the sense in the world. And that's how we're changing our model. And companies are loving it because they said, I really want to build that learning and development don't know how to do it or I don't have the resource to do it. They outsource to us. We do it as a fractional cost of the learning and development. We could do much better job because we're experts on doing learning and development for companies. But what I want to say is our clients were telling us what they needed and we were having a hard time kind of understanding until they said, hey, we want to be able to provide recurring revenue or pay you in a monthly basis, but you have to first figure out how to give me recurring value and build really a program for me for my learning and development, not just send me a course. Game changer for the way we operate.

You know, hang on a second. Just kind of spitballing here. Maybe not what you would think of in the show, but they're all the coaches, and like many of the coaches, we buy some licenses for our folks to do all the basic courses that you have, and some use it, some don't, and we probably need to one know who's using it and encourage more use of it. Speaking also to Wanda in the background, figuring out which of our clients are using and which are not using and remind them regularly that it's available to them is probably something that we could do because we're paying for it in either case for our clients as part of the whole value offering that we provide. But that next piece that you talk about, you know, I'm not sure that hardly any of the coaches are promoting that LMS ability to our clients. And that's something that we should take on and tell people as they're building out their online Learning, hey, you could actually put it on this platform that we have.

So we're starting to build that on onboarding programs. So if you have an onboarding, we will help you build an onboarding. We will send our, our crew to record your team, core values, everything, and really build you an onboarding process inside your institute. So they will brilliant the course as.

Part of the brilliant.

And the other thing we're doing for.

Our or anything standardized for that onboarding program. Sorry, do you have a package price or thing?

We are building it. We haven't launched it. We're building it for Growth Institute. Indeed. Two weeks ago, we recorded the videos of our team talking about our core values, and we're starting to build our own.

So when you get a couple pilot people to do it, tell us as soon as you've got that.

Perfect. I would love to do that. I will follow up with you, Bill, because I, I, I'm putting that the first quarter and we said we're gonna have to do our own first so we could show our.

Yeah. What it looks like.

Yeah, Bill, I, I think one of the really special things about Dan's group and I, I get to teach the scaling up course with Daniel. But in Scaling up, as we know, there's 40 different other industry thought leaders referenced in that book. And what the Growth Institute is doing is taking not only your dive into scaling up, but now diving into the other 40 types of authors in building a library, in a development program that doesn't stop at scaling up. It continues your journey and makes it that much more comprehensive. And at the end of the day, to scale up your company, you need to scale up your people. And Growth Institute is the vehicle to help you do that. So it's been a great addition. Clients have been asking for it. Final thing, these courses expose you to a global cohort. So you get different industries, different countries, whole bunch of different things you don't get in a traditional course, which I think has helped many of our CEOs with their network in their type of learning. So, Daniel, thank you to you and Vern for the innovations in that. It's been really amazing.

Thank you. It's been 10 years, and we're just getting it now. We've been getting better, but it's taking us 10 years to get it. And Bill, you said this earlier about the companies and how they really do identity in the world because they do a lot of small improvements.

Improvements, yes. Ten years, small tweaks, small improvements. So a couple things to think about there that I think are relevant. And one of them is really, Let's bring in online learning and then let's customize the learning. If we're a learning organization, if we're leveling up people, we're going to be getting better and better. And you can't do it if you're not doing it yourself. You can't get your team to do it if you're not also doing it. And if you're not doing learning, then you're probably not going to be a consistently scaling up company. You know, our next two subjects segue and maybe they're better said. They certainly go together, but they are maybe better said in reverse, right? The global economy is all over the place. Every region there's things going on differently. Inflation rates are up, down, sideways, and interest rates are all over the place. But there's not a direct correlation between, say, Fed rate and mortgage rates. So who knows where things are going. But our scale ups do well in any economy when they apply that. And one of the key moves to make is pricing. And it's not just about raising prices. It's about the thoughtful mix of things. It's about good, better, best. It's about bundling, it's about packaging, it's about demand pricing being dynamic in all of that. Verne mentions an article from Nation's Restaurant News about dynamic pricing in the restaurant industry and in particular to see if they could fill slower period times and increase off peak times. Right. To wait to the different times. There's times, we know the common meal times in a particular thing where there's a rush on the kitchen and the staff to produce. When people are hungry, they have a very, very short attention span. So how can we do more of that? If you're a really big company, really sophisticated, you can use AI to drive it. What are the pricing moves that you're seeing and grappling with in your company's? Herb and Daniel, you so I've seen.

A couple of the companies in the restaurant sector that have been playing with dynamic pricing. They're looking at surge times, lunches, dinner, trying to look at ways for certain menu items that would be priced higher than off hours during the day. I've also seen a switch to price increases where people were normally only looking at it maybe once a year in a bigger amount. They're doing it two to three times a year, smaller incremental amounts, but on a consistent basis. And they really haven't gotten little to any pushback from clienteles with that. And if you remember when you think of Inflation. Inflation is a ripple effect. It's never one set net cost. It's the ripple effect of multiple things. If you think of your company, you have materials, then you have supply chain, then you have wages, then you have health care and benefits, and then you have utility. It's like inflation creep. So whatever you began with the, at the beginning of the year, thinking a 5% bump in price is going to cover it by the end of the year. And all the creepy creep, you're up at like a 15 increase and now you're negative 10%. So it's really.

Well, you know, the other thing to remember is that recession, inflation, all these things are reported as averages. And when we think about 3, 5, 15, all of that we could manage, but they're not even. They're massively varied. So you could have your lumber costs like doubling while something else creeps up a little bit or, or even contracts like it's an overall average. And there are some things that rocket up that could just rock your world depending on the industry that you're in. I know in one of our past companies, our material costs more than doubled overnight. And you know, that totally threw us. And we bought a lot, a lot of product at higher costs. And we now, you know, more than 10 years later, haven't seen costs that high for those commodities. That can be very painful.

But hey, here's where dynamic pricing works great. As an example, have a client that has a cardboard company. He, he provides cardboard boxes for companies in Mexico. Pretty big company. And he said cardboard went significantly up and now it's way down. And now I'm going to lower the price by whatever percent they were like, oh, wait, wait, wait, wait. Because if you have a fixed price and then you bring it down back again, this is gonna be really hard. Why don't we go to dynamic pricing and let's start depending on when they buy it and whatever, and we'll, we'll figure out how to work dynamic. So we're now structuring how to do dynamic pricing based on volume, based on how much space. As an example, the biggest issue that he has, he has great service, but for him to be able to do that, he has to pre build and pre print boxes for you and put him in their warehouse to be able to have it for the client when the client has it. And I was like, yeah, then let's, let's do dynamic pricing. Said, hey, if we build for you and we put on your warehouse, we have a different pricing. So the pricing goes depending on how Many boxes we have in our warehouse. So we're playing with that, that very simple commodity business. But today, because of inflation even went way up and then way down. So being dynamic, I think it makes.

A lot of sense.

Pricing that I've seen, dynamic that I've never seen. It's cars now because there's shortage now they're having a lot of cars. The, the pricing that you go to a shop in a week and it's different pricing of a car.

So yeah, you know, I think there are a number of industries that have done this and there is a certain factor of annoy, right. Like if I rent a car, it'll quote me a price of, you know, oh, this is $49 a day or whatever it is, right? 79. Pick your number. But then when you actually get the car, there's like concession recovery and female and depot and license recovery and they have all these different fees in there, fuel surcharge and all these kinds of things thrown in there. Like what the heck is all this stuff? Stuff like, you know, I thought I was paying $49 a day, I took it for two days and my bill is $350. Like how did we get from there to there, right? Then there's the tax and the tourism tax and the special tax and the. So people are putting all kinds of fees like this. And we see this in telecom, we see it in car rental, we see it in airline. There's a whole range of them. And of course you could choose to do it a variety of ways. Like Southwest has no bag fees. Many other airlines have bag fees. If you fly one of the low cost carriers that's, that's blasting out there, the lowest prices between twos. You're going to pay for your seat, you're going to pay to put your tray table, you're going to pay to bring a carry on bag, you're going to pay to bring a check bag, you're going to pay to print your boarding pass, you're going to pay for your glass of water. Like you're going to pay for every little thing along the way, right? What they've unbundled essentially everything. I know when I fly United, I'm going to pay 1k1 thing. I'm going to sit in a better seat up front for free. You know, I'm going to have my drinks, my cookie and all that for free. I can bring my bags for free. I can check them or not check them. Like those are different approaches and they're all valid, but they're thoughtfully designed for the particular brand and company that, that you're with. Right.

Bill, you know, one of the things I've, I've seen in the last year is a lot of people don't, don't really leverage value based pricing. They've been in an industry for a while, everybody prices 25% margin. That's the way we do it. And then you sit with them and you're like, look, you're, you're a services firm. Maybe services and product and value based pricing has nothing to do with the set markup. It has to do with the strength of your brand, the value you deliver. And we'll challenge when you're doing value based pricing, the right price is a price you will not get every time, but you'll get it most every time. And you should keep moving up your pricing until you find that sweet spot. And I find many owners leave a lot of money on the table because they don't connect with that concept. And I think that's a great opportunity for many people this year.

Many industries are time based and that's driven by an idea of understanding and managing. But in many cases it's driven by the fear of the service providers in those industries. I don't want to give you a project price because I'm afraid that it'll take me a lot longer than I'm not going to get paid for my time. But almost always on the customer side is I'd like to get something done and I'd like to do it for a known set price. Right. I don't want to pay the contractors to come and put gutters on my roof at whatever time it takes them. No, I want to know exactly how many thousands of dollars that's going to take to put gutters on my house. Do it as fast as. If you want to come out here and do it one hour, fine. I just want to know that I'm getting a quality job and what I'm paying for it. And the same is true with so many things I'd much rather pay you for. Like, okay, you're a booking service. I want to pay you so much to book and prepare my show guests. You're an accounting service. I want to pay you a set amount per month to do my books. I want to pay you so much for each of these services. I'd much rather pay a set fee to do them than to pay you whatever it is. 100 an hour, a thousand an hour, you know, that kind of thing.

Yeah. One more thing that we talk when we do dynamic pricing is you don't, don't, you don't do dynamic pricing. In every product or service. There's some that you keep as fixed. So whenever we start talking about that, that's about the supermarkets, I ask people, do you know how much is an avocado? And some people know and then, then I say hey, do you know how much is the gas? And everyone knows how much is gas, but then that's okay. How much is your toilet paper? I have no idea. You have certain products that you care a lot about the pricing. There are some pros you just don't care about pricing like toilet paper or whatever. So I want you to be more dynamic and be able to raise your prices in the areas that your client doesn't really care about and be very, very competitive on the ones that they do. Care.

Care.

Whenever you see any of the ads of a supermarket, they just show you the products that they have. Very competitive and you come into the store because those competitive prices. But then you end up buying 20 more things in the supermarket. So the same thing we talk with our clients that hey, okay, let's do analysis of all your prices that you have and which ones are the ones your clients care for and then let's work on those and the rest, let's play them dynamic based on purchase or frequency or whatever of the client.

Yeah, we had a restaurant client some years ago that did this. They were looking at cost increases in the, in their city and attacks that was coming out and they were really freaked out about going out of business. And they're like, you know, there's price, what can we do? How can we do? We can't just go. I'm like, there's all kinds of things on your menu here that are at all different margin levels. And people care more about like they're leading with you know, their, their primary coffee drink but they're not thinking about the add on costs or the other things like there's all kinds of places. So they ended up keeping a certain number of like key focal point prices the same. But other things that people weren't thinking about as much, letting those creep up and they ended up with a blended average price increase that more than cover their cost and they became more profitable. And the shift in that thinking was then forever with so that when they needed to adjust something, they could do it without freaking people out, do it on the things they don't care about. I've done this many times with hotel venues for our clients. I'm like the client cares very much. Maybe they shouldn't, but about the price for the meeting room for our off site, right? They care very much about that. They maybe care a little bit about the hotel room cost, but they really care about that meeting. Oh my God, that room's $1,500. Like if you give me a $500 meeting room cost, you can make it up with some food and beverage, with some av, with some other kinds of things like that. You can add on some and, and you're going to be whole across the board. And some are like, yeah, we can't do that with our accounting. But others are like, do it. And of course we take our business and our clients to them because they think about where are they sensitive, right? There's these emotional irrational sensitivities to things that we do. Like I had a client years ago with our software company was like, oh my God, these people want to charge us $150 an hour for development. This is a long time ago. And for software development. And I'm like, oh yeah, it's crazy. He's like, you know, we just really want to get this thing done. I'm like, you know, we'll help you. And so we, we did their work for them. And I'm like, what do you want to pay? When do you want to get this done? What do you want to get done? So we laid out, you know, I'd really like to get this project done. I'm going to make up some numbers here, like $60,000 in six weeks. And I looked at it and I looked at his requirements. I said, okay, as long as we do like have these constraints, $60,000 in six weeks, we'll get that done for you.

Right?

And so I then assembled my team. We figured out how to approach it and we did it. And we were a little bit early and we were on budget and he was like, oh my God, this is so great. I'm so glad we switched you from that crazy hundred and fifty dollars an hour company. Yeah, what do you want to bet? What do you want to guess? My hourly effective rate was 250. No, it was over 500.

Oh wow.

It was over 500 hour. My effective rate on him, I'm like, I'm just going to solve differently because I'm not trying to maximize the time on the thing I'm trying to solve and get him on time, get him delivered his functionality and he set his budget and he was overjoyed. He's like, oh my God, I spent exactly what I wanted to. I got it exactly when I needed to. That's that a different mindset of a different person. I'm like, yeah, and I got exactly a new car.

That's great, that's great, right?

And everybody's happy. And so there's that creative thinking that needs to go in. Well, we've been talking about money. Let's talk about a more precious constraint and resource and that's time. Before we do that, let me just mention we have a tech tool ourselves for the world of Scaling Up Up. He's not with us today because of holiday family issue, but Eugene Turk was going to be with us and he does a lot of the running of our Align Today software tools. So the Align Today is the Scaling Up Scoreboard, the official Scaling up scoreboard. And we probably have half our clients who use it now. We offer it to all of them. Some of them have their own system or something, some analog for it. But if you get Scaling up, you've got a plan you want to execute again, the course stay on track. And the Scaling Up Scoreboard is exactly a system to do that. To run your huddles, your weekly meetings, put in your quarterly planning, your annual plan, your one page strategic plan, your vision summary, all that stuff, your key metrics for the thing, your critical numbers, everything that and more in a purpose built scoreboard that can be branded for your team and so on. That's the Scaling up scoreboard with aligntoday.com and as I said, I have about half of our clients, really after a quarter of 2 of working together on paper, we like to get them using some kind of a system to track more consistently what they're doing. So if you don't have something now, you should go check out aligntoday.com and you get some kind of a thing. If you mention our podcast and that Bill Gallagher sent you, you get a little special something extra. So be sure and do that so that as friends of the show and members of the family, they know where you came from. Tell Growth Institute, the Daniel's team that you came, you heard it here first, so that they know that you're a listener, viewer of the show. So talking about time, time management, everybody wants to have more time. They're like, oh my God, the year is ending, the holiday is upon us. Some people are working right up until midnight on December 31, bringing in the new year and closing that last deal. Vern shares an article, 4000 weeks time management for mortals. People spend a lot of time on the idea of clearing out our inbox and. And he says our lives are too short. What are you doing? What did you guys get from the article? What are your practices, client methods, personal learnings in this area?

So I just, I have a couple of things that I've kind of been working on through the years. Number one, identifying my high paying activities. Where do I leverage my time and my ability and what are those few things and how do I almost like Stephen Covey with the big rocks. Those are the big rocks that have to go into my schedule first. And so they are teaching, coaching and learning. Because if I'm not learning I can't be a great coach supporting great CEOs. But those are the three things that are always in my calendar. And then my wife who's also my partner handles everything else. Second thing I would tell you is I like to stack back to back high paying activities because I find you get in a flow and if you can stack them back to back then you'll get in a flow and you'll be able to optimize the great energy that you have when you're doing those high paying activities. So if I can do them 9, 10:30, noon 1:33 and 5, I'm going to do that. The third thing I got from Dan Sullivan with strategic coach and that was the difference between a buffer day, a free day and a focus day. And a focus day is my high paying activity. But my yep, thank you. My buffer day was protecting time to do those things that really needed to be done in the business like signing accounts, payable checks, reviewing the financial statements and yet doing that in a separate distinct time in protecting my time for doing that. And the final one is free days protecting the time that I need for me my family, work, life, balance. And I schedule those all a quarter in advance every quarter. And those have been great strategies throughout my career that have been very helpful.

Daniel.

So same with her. I use the same focus days, execution days and and preparation days. So as an example for me Monday, Monday is my what I call team day and it's my day with my team. All calls are with my team and I start with a daily or so a weekly call with burn 8am and then my, my weekly call with my team. Her always attends our weekly and help us with the team and then have my marketing team, my coaching reviewing with my team. Like everything on Monday it's all about the team and running growth institute. And then Tuesday and Wednesday for me is coaching. I try to have all my coaching calls Tuesday and Wednesday and then Thursday is content day and usually I do all my videos. I wrote my book on Thursday. Everything was on Thursday and then Friday that I called CO day and it's for me to catch up things that I didn't finish on the week already have my think time and I use a little bit on structure my Friday so I could have that and clean things out. Because I usually fill out Friday and then I was doing catch up on Saturday and now I have Friday empty. So I could do all the catch up and then I could be on the weekend with my family with no distraction. So I do that a lot, you know.

Yeah, well, I think there's something there about you're both speaking to a Dan Sullivan described some things. You describe a little bit about creating different times and that especially works for leaders who can have a lot of control over their schedule and can organize it. There's another practice I learned some years ago that I think is really useful and that is to combine something like, like a Wheel of Life exercise or your one page personal plan or Lifebook or that kind of thing. Think about what are all the fundamental areas of your life and concerns that are important to you and then from the future, looking back, design in the time. So how much vacation time do you need and where is that going to occur? How much family time, how much personal time, how much playtime, how much exercise time, how much time for relationship? Where do all these things occur? I remember once somebody talked about like, you know, when is your date night? And that kind of thing. And somebody suggested Friday night. And I'm like, you know, at this point in my life, by then I was a dad and very active. I mean, I'm still a dad today, but the kids are grown. But I'm like, Friday night sounds like a horrible night for date night to me because I'm exhausted on Friday night. Maybe that's coming together and finishing the week. But Saturday night is not a bad date night because now I've had a. I could breathe. Maybe there's a little time we get the babysitter in and we could go do something that's kind of fun. So. But what are those things? And I think they continually need to be redesigned. And if you don't do it, you're going to chase everything, every client, everybody else, like everywhere, right? So we're like, okay, when should our CEO calls be? When should our team days be? When should our whatever. And when I have a client who says, oh, we want to put our off site in that week, I'm like, yeah, that's not a week that we do off sites. I'm busy that week or I don't have that open. So I might tell them it's not common for people to do it and we're already booked. Maybe you should look at this week instead and try to steer them to a slightly different timing and that leading them out. So we think about, okay, so all of March and the first week of April is probably team off site days, right? Like those are days that we're going to do quarterly planning because most people want to have it done before maybe the second week of April. But by April 15, I'm done with all that stuff and then I'm not back into it until June. June and the first couple weeks of July are again, very busy times. Then in between, there might be new client work conferences, things like that CEO calls, right? But like your, when is your meeting day? When is your workout time? Design those things in. And then I wouldn't tell people, oh, that's my playtime. If you need playtime in your life, I'm just booked then I'm sorry, I'm sorry, we're already booked. Then don't have people judging and evaluating how you're spending your time. Have it. Have them get the, like the whole picture. But what are the fundamental concerns? And it's not balanced like, equal. Right. Like if you spend some quality time with your family and you're really, really there and present, you probably don't need as much time as a lot of time where you're not fully present, where you're taking calls, emails, answering text messages, things like that. Like, if I'm really with you. Right.

Bill, you know what? And one of the most amazing things I found, if you think of your biggest breakthrough ideas, were they ever in the office in the middle of a day of meetings, or were they typically in the shower on a nature walk on a family vacation? When I connected that dot, I said, I can't afford not to take that time because we get some of the best ideas for the company.

Yes. Driving, exercising, showering first thing in the morning. If you're at all an ideator, and many of our listeners are, then you're going to get a lot of these ideas in these kind of idle times where you're decompressing or in the middle of dinner or at some other point where they're going to rise to you. That's one reason why I have a thing called Aqua Notes. You can find it on Amazon. Aqua Notes is a little kind of a notepad and pencil that you can stick in your shower. It's one of my favorite little things, and there are times where they really are flowing with me. I'm like, oh, my God, that. That's how I'm going to handle that. And I can write it down in the shower. The other thing I use with my aqua notes, I have two pads. Normally, one of them also is my purpose. Values, brand promises, and bhag. Right. I have all of that written on an aqua note. And I begin my day looking over at that and reflecting on some part of it. In the beginning, I would say them out loud while I took a shower. That seems really awkward to some people. But now I just kind of look over and I'm like, oh, yeah, today is a day for courageous authenticity. Oh, yeah. Today is a day of innovation, of creating. Right. Oh, today is a good day to laugh. Like, so these are some of our values. And many days it's like, no. My purpose is helping leaders build a better world. My purpose is helping leaders fulfill their vision for something that makes the world a better place. And I'm gonna go do that today. Right. Sometimes it's just really getting. But that's written on my aqua notes. And then I've got a place for some idea, and I can write it down quickly and pull it out of the shower as I walk out.

You're gonna laugh, but I use Alexa because we have an Alexa in the bathroom. And I'll be like, alexa, make a sticky note and it will make it. And when I come out, I got it right there waiting for me.

That's not a bad idea. Yeah. So I have Sonos in my shower, and pretty much the music is cranked. And I am, like, singing and dancing in the shower as I get ready in the morning. And that maybe creates a picture you didn't need. But this morning playlist. This morning's playlist was Bad Bunny, if that gives it Bad bunny at max volume in the bathroom while I'm taking a shower was my jam for starting my journey.

Too funny.

Too much details, Bill. Too much detail.

Right. Well, hey, that's probably. We're long in time. Let's end it here. Herb cogliano aspire growth advisors.com yeah, herb.

Aspire growth advisors.com There you go.

And Daniel growth institute.com daniel.com Reach out for whatever you need.

Awesome. And of course, we've shouted ourselves out endlessly, but you can drop us a note info scalingcoach.com if there's anything we can help you with. I want to give a shout out also to my friend and mentor, author and creator of the Rockefeller Habits, the Scaling Up Framework itself, Vern Harnish. And to Wanda Mitchell, getting things ready in the background. And to our partners at Podfly Productions, who get our show out every week.

Week.

Albert Burge over there editing our show and getting it ready. Thanks again, everyone, for watching, for listening. We'll talk to you again next time. Keep scaling up.

Happy holidays.

Happy holidays to you. Close it out with the Be ill theme.